This article argues that the descriptive turn evident in contemporary capitalism challenges orthodox sociological emphases on the central importance of causality and the denigration of descriptive methods. The article reviews the different evocations of descriptive sociology pronounced by three very different contemporary sociologists: Andrew Abbott, John Goldthorpe, and Bruno Latour, and lays out their different approaches to the role of the `sociological descriptive'. It is argued that their apparent differences need to be placed in a broader re-orientation of sociology away from its historical interface with the humanities and towards the natural sciences. How this reorientation involves a new role for visual methods which have traditionally been decried in orthodox sociology is examined, and the article concludes with suggestions for how sociology might best orient itself to the descriptive turn.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1368431008099650

Contemporary Sociology and the Challenge of Descriptive Assemblage

This article relates Archer's morphogenetic approach, derived from the philosophical tradition of critical realism, to the use of information and communication technology in organizations. Three gains are seen to accrue from this approach: greater clarity about the material properties of technology, links to broader structural conditions arising from the conceptualization of the relationship between agency and structure, and the potential to explore the importance of reflexivity in contemporary organizations, especially in conditions of the widespread use of information and communication technology. The importance of disaggregating the artifacts of this technology into levels and features is stressed to enable analysis to explore the specific impacts of particular combinations. This is developed through a discussion of data warehousing in connection with the attention being given to the importance of analytics in organizational strategies. Key features are in wider aspects of the cultural and structural context, demonstrating the fruitfulness of a morphogenetic approach.

Technology, Organization, and Structure---A Morphogenetic Approach

This article represents both a continuance and a reformulation of an ongoing project: a call to sociology proper to “bring nature back in.” Moving beyond such earlier heuristics as Demeritt’s “conj...

Society, Biology, and Ecology: Bringing Nature Back Into Sociology’s Disciplinary Narrative Through Critical Realism

The past 20 years have seen major developments in theoretical and empirical scholarship in the sociological study of religion. Most of the European founders of sociology, of course, engaged religion as an important dimension of understanding social order and transformation. The 20th century saw the production of many significant works in the sociology of religion in the United States. Yet the mostly taken-for-granted nature of the larger secularization theory that overshadowed a lot of social scientific thinking about religion during much of the past century tended to undermine the taking too seriously of religious institutions, cultures and movements. Old-timers today often report that when they were in graduate school they were actively discouraged by mentors from studying religion. Why invest in studying something that was destined to wither and die? They had to swim against the current to study religion. As a result, in some decades, the sociology of religion languished. How times have changed. Unexpectedly, socio-political events in recent decades have forced religion back onto the scholarly table for social scientists to reconsider. Beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing thereafter, major world events and movements – liberation theology in Latin America, the Iranian Revolution, the Religious Right in the United States, Catholic Solidarity in Poland, the church-led anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, the strongly religious U.S.-Central America solidarity movement, the spread of Pentecostalism in the Global South, the growing cultural power of American evangelicalism, and, of course, the eruption of militant Islam sometimes violently confronting the West – forced all but the most resistant social scientists to acknowledge that, whatever might be the validity of secularization theory long term, religion was clearly still a present and important force in social, political, and cultural life that needed to be researched, understood, theorized and explained (Berger 1999). In significant part because of the stunting legacy of secularization theory in academia, however – and perhaps due to the field’s somewhat narrow focus in the 1970s on “cults” and other new religious movements – many social scientists (as well as journalists and many of the educated public) at first found themselves lacking adequate analytical tools and so made more than a few false starts and misguided efforts trying to make sense of the religious reality they confronted. Despite these theoretical disadvantages, however, sociologists of religion in the past two decades have – often with the help of research grants from well endowed private foundations with interests in studying

Future Directions in the Sociology of Religion

Children have an unsettled relationship with the status of citizenship, being given some rights, responsibilities and opportunities for participation, and being denied others. Yet if citizenship is conceived of as a practice, children can be firmly seen as citizens in the sense that they are social actors, negotiating and contributing to relationships of social interdependence. This article develops understandings of children’s agency in citizenship and some of the different ways in which children’s actions enact them as interdependent citizens. It presents one aspect of the understanding of citizenship generated from research with six groups of marginalized children, aged 5–13, in Wales and France. Synthesizing the research groups’ descriptions of activities they associated with the component parts of citizenship with citizenship theory, these children can be seen to engage in actions of citizenship that include making rules of social existence, furthering social good and exercising freedoms to achieve t...

/pdf/enacting-children-s-citizenship-developing-understandings-of-9qetejthwb.pdf

Enacting children's citizenship: developing understandings of how children enact themselves as citizens through actions and acts of citizenship

In recent years, methodological debates in the social sciences have increasingly focused on issues relating to epistemology. Realism and Sociology makes an original contribution to the debate, charting a middle ground between postmodernism and positivism.Critics often hold that realism tries to assume some definitive account of reality. Against this it is argued throughout the book that realism can combine a strong definition of social reality with an anti-foundational approach to knowledge. The position of realist anti-foundationalism that is argued for is developed and defended via the use of immanent critiques. These deal primarily with post-Wittgensteinian positions that seek to define knowledge and social reality in terms of 'rule-following practices' within different 'forms of life' and 'language games'. Specifically, the argument engages with Rorty's neo-pragmatism and the structuration theory of Giddens. The philosophy of Popper is also drawn upon in a critically appreciative way.While the positions of Rorty and Giddens seek to deflate the claims of 'grand theory', albeit in different ways, they both end up with definitive claims about knowledge and reality that preclude social research. By avoiding the general deflationary approach that relies on reference to 'practices', realism is able to combine a strong social ontology with an anti-foundational epistemology, and thus act as an underlabourer for empirical research.

Justin Cruickshank

Papers

Realism and Sociology: Anti-Foundationalism, Ontology and Social Research